🔗 Share this article

A pair of youngsters experience a intimate, tender moment at the local secondary school’s outdoor swimming pool after hours. While they drift together, hanging beneath the stars in the quietness of the night, the sequence captures the ephemeral, heady thrill of adolescent romance, completely engrossed in the present, consequences overlooked.

About 30 minutes into The Chainsaw Man Film: Reze Arc, it became clear these scenes are the heart of the film. The love story became the focus, and every bit of contextual information and backstories I had gleaned from the anime’s first season turned out to be mostly irrelevant. Despite being a canonical entry within the series, Reze Arc provides a more accessible entry point for first-time viewers — even if they haven’t seen its single episode. This method brings advantages, but it also hinders some of the tension of the film’s narrative.

Developed by the original creator, Chainsaw Man chronicles the protagonist, a debt-ridden fiend fighter in a world where demons represent particular dangers (including concepts like getting older and obscurity to terrifying entities like cockroaches or historical conflicts). When he’s deceived and murdered by the yakuza, he forms a contract with his faithful devil-dog, Pochita, and returns from the dead as a chainsaw-human hybrid with the ability to permanently erase Devils and the terrors they signify from reality.

Plunged into a violent conflict between demons and hunters, Denji meets a new character — a alluring coffee server concealing a deadly mystery — sparking a tragic confrontation between the pair where affection and existence collide. The movie picks up right after season 1, exploring the main character’s connection with Reze as he grapples with his emotions for her and his loyalty to his controlling superior, his employer, forcing him to decide among desire, faithfulness, and self-preservation.

An Independent Love Story Within a Broader Universe

Reze Arc is fundamentally a romance-to-rivalry plot, with our imperfect protagonist Denji becoming enamored with Reze right away upon meeting. He’s a isolated young man looking for affection, which renders him unreliable and easily swayed on a first-come, first-served. Consequently, despite all of Chainsaw Man’s complex mythology and its large cast of characters, Reze Arc is highly independent. Director the director understands this and guarantees the romantic arc is at the center, rather than bogging it down with filler recaps for the new viewers, especially when such details is crucial to the complete plot.

Despite Denji’s imperfections, it’s difficult not to feel for him. He is still a teenager, stumbling his way through a world that’s warped his sense of right and wrong. His intense craving for love makes him come off like a lovesick dog, even if he’s prone to growling, biting, and causing chaos along the way. Reze is a perfect pairing for him, an effective femme fatale who finds her prey in our hero. You want to see Denji win the ire of his affection, even if Reze is clearly hiding something from him. So when her real identity is unveiled, you still cannot avoid hope they’ll in some way make it work, even though internally, it is known a positive outcome is never really in the cards. As such, the tension fail to seem as intense as they should be since their romance is fated. It doesn’t help that the movie acts as a direct sequel to the first season, allowing little room for a love story like this amid the darker events that fans know are coming soon.

Stunning Animation and Technical Craftsmanship

This movie’s graphics effortlessly combine traditional animation with 3D environments, delivering impressive eye candy even before the excitement begins. Including vehicles to tiny desk fans, digital assets add depth and texture to each shot, making the 2D characters pop strikingly. In contrast to Demon Slayer, which frequently showcases its digital elements and changing backgrounds, Reze Arc employs them less frequently, particularly evident during its action-packed climax, where those models, though not unappealing, become easier to identify. Such fluid, dynamic backgrounds render the movie’s battles both visually bombastic and surprisingly simple to understand. Still, the technique excels most when it’s unnoticeable, improving the vibrancy and motion of the 2D animation.

Concluding Thoughts and Wider Considerations

Chainsaw Man – The Movie: Reze Arc serves as a solid starting place, probably resulting in first-time audiences satisfied, but it additionally carries a drawback. Telling a self-contained narrative limits the tension of what ought to seem like a sprawling animated saga. It’s an example of why following up a successful anime season with a movie is not the optimal approach if it weakens the franchise’s overall narrative possibilities.

While Demon Slayer: Infinity Castle succeeded by tying up several seasons of animated series with an grand movie, and JuJutsu Kaisen 0 sidestepped the problem entirely by acting as a backstory to its popular series, Chainsaw Man – The Movie: Reze Arc charges forward, perhaps a slightly foolishly. However this does not prevent the movie from proving to be a great time, a excellent point of entry, and a unforgettable love story.